Display of the Laudian Vestments and College Silver

The College’s collection of medieval vestments will be on display, alongside an exhibition of College silver on the theme of ‘wit and humour’. 

This small exhibition will display a selection of the College’s silver where the humour and playfulness of the silversmiths is particularly apparent. A lion sits on a magnificent tankard, a loveable badger peers curiously over the thumb-piece of another: these are functional, but also rather witty objects. A nineteenth-century cap is moulded in the shape of a noblewoman wearing a corset, ruff and padded sleeves, and an eighteenth-century pot complements its chinoiserie design with a riverside scene and a wooden handle in the shape of a man. 

And of course, the playfulness was not only that of the creators of these objects. This silver was used: it is part of the cultural and social history of the college. And students in the past, as now, liked to laugh. On display here is a silver tankard with some graffiti inside the lid bragging that one ‘R.A.C. floored this tankard’ in 1842.